2
Children at the Rectory
‘It’s Leslie, Simeon. Leslie Titmuss.’
‘Welcome, Leslie! Have we no cake or any such thing?’
‘I think he’s come to do a job,’ Dorothy said firmly.
A long war, widely thought to have defeated the forces of tyranny and injustice and ushered in the age of the Common Man, whoever he was, had been over for three years. The British had dismissed Mr Churchill and installed a Labour Government, an event which caused Simeon to choose, as a frequent text, Revelation chapter 21, verse 1, ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and earth had passed away.’ His sermons at the time often referred to the New Jerusalem in a way which may have been unclear to his congregation, who were being told by the Government to pull in their belts and who found, despite their undoubted victory, that everything was still on coupons.
After a cold spring and early summer the weather became exceptionally fine and hot, as it was on the day that the twelve-year-old Leslie Titmuss stood in the Rectory garden, wearing long shorts and grey socks which fell like a couple of woollen concertinas over his dusty shoes. In honour of his visit to the Rector and his wife he had slicked his hair down with brilliantine (‘Anzora masters the hair’) and it was as flat and shiny as patent leather, apart from a little crest which stood up stiffly on the crown of his head, giving him an eager and birdlike appearance. His arrival had interrupted Simeon’s dictation of letters of protest to the Bishop on the Church’s lack of leadership on the question of apartheid in South Africa, and worried Dorothy, who was afraid that, if left to his own devices, Leslie might dig up her most tender plants.
‘Why, Leslie,’ Simeon said. ‘Whatever’s that?’ The child had in his hands a small statuette of a lady in a bright red bathing-suit standing on a rock. She was leaning slightly forward, one hand stretched out behind her, the other with a finger laid lightly on her cherry-coloured lips. Her eyes were open very wide, her expression could only be described as ‘roguish’, and the base of the statue bore, in gilt letters, the legend ‘A Present from Cleethorpes’.
‘It’s for you, Mrs Simcox.’ Leslie held out the trophy towards Dorothy, who retreated slightly.
‘Dear me. Where did you get it?’
‘I got it for you,’ Leslie said, not quite answering the question.
‘Leslie! You must learn not to do things like that.’ Dorothy sounded severe but her husband interrupted her. ‘Leslie Titmuss comes bearing gifts! How exciting. Do let me see.’ To his wife’s despair he took the object.
‘It’s a present, Mr Simcox.’
‘It’s a beautiful object.’ Simeon sounded almost convinced. ‘My dear, isn’t that a most beautiful object? Wasn’t it kind and thoughtful of Leslie?’
‘Leslie. As you’re here,’ Dorothy said firmly, ‘I was thinking about the nettles.’
‘The nettles by the old croquet lawn?’ The boy sounded eager.
‘Yes, Leslie. Those nettles.’
‘We shall treasure this, Leslie. We shall keep it on our mantel-piece,’ said Simeon, who was left holding the gift as young Titmuss marched off to get a hook for the execution of the nettles.
‘Shall we have to?’ Dorothy said, when he was out of earshot.
‘Of course.’
‘But the thing’s hideous!’
‘Hideous things are something we have to put up with,’ her husband explained patiently. ‘We can’t shut our eyes to them. That wouldn’t be right.’
‘I can shut my eyes to a present from Cleethorpes any day of the week, Simeon! You’re not going to put it next to my little bit of Spode?’
‘We really can’t offend the boy.’
‘I don’t see why not. He’s such a particularly disagreeable child.’
‘That’s not a very Christian thing to say.’ Simeon looked at his wife sadly.
‘Why not? Perhaps God made people like Leslie Titmuss so we can find out who’s nice. Freddie!’ As she said the last word Dorothy looked upwards and sighed. In his bedroom her younger son was accompanying a record on the second-hand drum set they had allowed him to save up for at Christmas. She went upstairs to Fred’s room, knowing that her husband had a busy afternoon ahead. She switched off the gramophone and ‘My Very Good Friend the Milkman’ was cut off in mid-flow. The accompaniment also fell silent. ‘Your father’s working,’ she said. ‘He’s trying to write letters to the Bishop.’
‘What about?’
‘About what they’re doing to the black men in Africa, if you must know.’ Fred was gently swishing on a drum with a wire-brush. ‘Fats Waller’s black,’ he said, ‘and you switched him off.’
‘Try not to be childish, Freddie,’ his mother advised him.
In the end she had her way about the present from Cleethorpes. It didn’t disturb the Spode in the living-room. It landed up on the mantelpiece in Simeon’s study, along with a number of invitations to lecture, a clock that kept poor time, a wood carving of a pregnant woman he had brought back from a visit to an Anglican bishop in Nigeria and a small bust of Karl Marx.
Although the summer holidays seemed endless the boys were never bored. There was always too much to do at home. Fred played his records and practised from manuals with such titles as Jazz Drumming for Beginners, for which he sent away. Henry was writing a long novel in a number of school notebooks which he kept hidden in his sock drawer and was secretly hurt that Fred had never asked to read them. When it was hot they bicycled down to Hartscombe, the local riverside town, and took out a dinghy. They quarrelled about the efficiency of each other’s rowing (Henry always steered them out to mid-stream and Fred got their heads scraped by overhanging willows near the bank) and pulled up past the lock where they swam in the river. The water was dark and brackish, filled with rasping reeds, and, if your foot touched the bottom, black mud oozed between your toes. Sometimes they had wished on them the company of Agnes Salter, whose father was their doctor and a family friend. They seemed to quarrel less when Agnes was with them. She dived better and more neatly than they did and showed no terror when Henry deliberately rowed towards the churning, yellowish water of the weir. When she was in her black one-piece Jansen bathing-suit Fred would avoid looking at her, afraid he might find her beautiful. When he was alone he thought mainly about Betty Grable.
Dorothy was busy gardening, preserving, making jam and potting meat, seeking refuge in such occupations from too much contact with her husband’s parish. She had been an Oxford professor’s daughter, brought up on Boar’s Hill in a small house where the garden was filled after lunch on Sundays with high-pitched, excitable voices discussing the reviews in the New Statesman and Fabian Socialism. Such an upbringing didn’t equip her for running white elephant stalls at local fêtes, or afternoons with the Women’s Institute. She believed that, in an ideal world, the working classes would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.
Simeon pursued his political interests more doggedly. He sat for long hours at the desk in his study, among a clutter of pipe-racks, walking-sticks, pamphlets, Left Book Club volumes, Penguins and blue papers, cuttings from Tribune and the News Chronicle, haphazard shelves supporting the works of Engels and R.H. Tawney, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, the Webbs and Bertrand Russell. He went regularly to meetings, committees, protests and deputations in London. During such absences Henry sat in his father’s chair and became quite intolerably bossy.
On the whole they were a closely knit group and, like all parsons’ or policemen’s families, set apart from their neighbours. When Simeon had an evening away from his correspondence they played bridge. Henry overbid outrageously and quickly lost interest. Fred underbid but played his hand with determination. Dorothy joined in with her mind elsewhere and Simeon had an unexpectedly good memory for the cards and took a great pleasure in winning. Once, when he went to the lavatory during a deal, Henry contrived to present him with all the hearts. When Simeon picked up his hand he was bubbling with tr
iumph and a kind of childish glee, until he realized that he’d been deceived and became disappointed and sad.
Often the boys decided to get up plays, but openings were postponed because they couldn’t agree. On one remarkable occasion Simeon offered to accompany them in scenes from Shakespeare given to the single audience of Dorothy. As he had played Lady Macbeth at school their father undertook the ‘Letter Scene’ again, his tall, bony figure fitted into one of the old black evening-dresses Dorothy was about to send away as jumble, and a sort of lace mantilla. Inappropriately, considering the climate at Glamis, he carried a fan. While waiting in the hallway to make an entrance Simeon heard the front door bell ring and unthinkingly opened it to a young couple who’d come to be prepared for marriage. Seeing what they took to be the Rector en travesti, they backed away into the darkness. Much was to be made of this incident in the distant future, but such extraordinary events were rare. Most of the time life at the Rectory was quiet, as it was on the summer afternoon when Leslie Titmuss hacked at the nettles on the edge of the old croquet lawn, and Henry lay on his stomach in the long grass with an open exercise book in front of him, chewing a pencil.
‘What are you doing?’ Leslie paused in his work to ask.
‘Just writing a novel.’
‘What’s a novel?’
‘It’s a picture of our society, from top to bottom. A human story.’ Henry began to write again, as if to deter conversation.
‘Got any bits about girls in it, has it?’ Leslie fell upon the nettles again, slaughtering them wildly.
‘Yes. But you wouldn’t understand them.’
‘Is it difficult? Writing that, I mean.’
‘For some people.’
‘I bet it’s not as hard as getting rid of these old nettles.’
Henry looked up at Leslie, as though at some specimen whose activities he was about to record in a nature notebook. ‘What’re you doing that for?’
‘Your mum gives me half a crown.’ Leslie didn’t stop hacking.
‘My parents exploit you! It’s the beer money.’
‘I don’t get any beer money.’
‘They do,’ Henry explained patiently. ‘Out of Simcox Ales. The Brewery in Hartscombe keeps our family going, so they can exploit the workers.’
‘They’re all right. I brought your dad a present, a statue. He was delighted with it.’
‘It’s because you live in Skurfield,’ Henry told the worker. ‘My parents think everyone who lives in Skurfield’s there to be exploited. They don’t ask me to cut down the nettles.’
‘Your mum says she’s asked you. But you don’t ever do it.’
Henry started to write again. ‘When the revolution comes,’ he said, ‘they’ll be the first to go.’
‘Where?’
Henry was busy and didn’t answer.
‘Where will they be the first to go?’
‘Never you mind.’
Leslie stopped hacking and pushed back his sticky hair. ‘Where will you be, Henry? When the revolution comes?’
‘Probably in charge.’
Fred said, ‘Leslie Titmuss is going to Hartscombe Grammar.’
‘Leslie’s done well. He’s got his wits about him.’
‘I’d like to go to Hartscombe Grammar.’
‘I suppose none of us can have everything they want in this world.’
Fred was with his father in the church vestry, with its smell of mice and old prayer-books, among the choir surplices and bleeding hassocks in need of repair. He was pumping away at a harmonium, playing the chorus of ‘My Very Good Friend the Milkman’, which he could do because he had an ear for music. Simeon was at a table, cutting bread into small cubes for the Communion service. Both the boys had been to a preparatory day school not far away. Now the plan was to send them to a public school, Knuckleberries, on the Norfolk coast. Simeon had himself been to this remote establishment, and his brother, Pym Simcox, who was Chairman of the Brewery (Pym later shot himself in the hop loft for some unfathomable reason), spent his schooldays there. This period of Uncle Pym’s life, wretchedly unhappy at the time, later became a source of mysterious and almost mystical pride to him. Pym always, even at the moment of death, wore the O.K. tie, and regularly reported his unchanging circumstances in the Knuckleberrian. It seemed to Fred that he and Henry were being mercilessly dispatched to this mysterious institution as some sort of compensation for Uncle Pym Simcox’s untimely death.
‘Why do I have to go to Knuckleberries?’ Fred stopped playing and asked, not for the first time that summer. ‘I mean, I thought you believed in everyone being equal. Don’t you believe in everyone going to Hartscombe Grammar?’
‘I suppose things aren’t always so simple.’
‘Why aren’t they?’
‘I respect that in you, Frederick,’ Simeon assured him. ‘I respect you for asking questions.’
‘So will you tell me why I have to go to Knuckleberries?’
‘Perhaps it’s the will of God.’ Simeon spoke in a somewhat offhanded manner of the Divine Plan and then pulled a wristwatch with a broken strap out of the pocket of his cassock. ‘Good heavens. Parish meeting! Couldn’t you do the rest for me?’
Fred got up and went reluctantly to the table and fiddled with the knife. ‘Does it turn into flesh, during the service?’ he asked, looking at the bread.
‘Freddy! You know it doesn’t.’ Simeon looked as though his son had expressed a literal belief in Santa Claus.
‘It might do. One day it might surprise you. I don’t suppose you can be certain. Well, if it doesn’t do anything interesting, why do you have it in the service?’
‘To celebrate the basic things of life, Frederick,’ Simeon explained patiently. ‘The bread that’s made simply. Kneaded and put to rise in the oven.’
‘It’s a sliced loaf, isn’t it? Doesn’t it get made in a factory?’ Fred looked up at his father surprised, for when he said that Simeon appeared, on his way out of the vestry, to be laughing.
That afternoon Fred went to the village shop with his mother and he asked her, ‘Is it the will of God, Henry and me going to Knuckleberries?’
‘It may not be the will of God,’ Dorothy said. ‘It’s something that’s been arranged.’
‘Did Dad arrange it?’
‘Well, no. He doesn’t always arrange things. You know he’s so busy.’
‘What’s he so busy at, exactly?’
‘Good heavens, you know! The Labour Party and the Worsfield Mission and the United Nations and the Peace Pledge Union and South Africa…’
‘You arranged it!’ Fred’s voice was accusing.
‘It’s much better for you and Henry to be away at school. Anyway, you know your Uncle Pym went to Knuckleberries.’
‘So you arranged for us to go there too?’
‘I suppose I did.’
‘So it’s the will of God?’ Fred took an apple out of the shopping-basket and bit into it. He felt then that he was powerless in the hands of fate. His mother, he knew, was an implacable, unpersuadable force. She looked at him, smiling vaguely, and said, ‘Poor Freddie! You do come out with some strange ideas.’
3
Knuckleberries and After
What Fred hated was the dormitory. He longed for his small maid’s bedroom in the Rectory with its dormer window, his drums and records and pinned-up pages from the Picturegoer. He wanted to be alone, with his milk and biscuits, to read The History of the Blues in peace. The dormitory was a long, dark, bare, barrack-like room with iron bedsteads and icy draughts which blew in through the compulsorily opened windows direct from Siberia with no intervening mountain range. It was also the scene of sudden outbreaks of violence, the selection of victims and lightning shifts in popularity from which, it must be said, Henry always emerged unscathed and Fred only occasionally suffered.
One night he was sitting up in bed in his dressing-gown, pyjamas and socks before lights out. Parted from his drums he had a tin chamber-pot inverted on his lap and, with
a pair of wire-brushes, he was swishing out the rhythm of ‘Slow Boat to China’, a recent hit. Around him some boys were on their knees, some were throwing slippers at those praying, others were taking advantage of a last chance to clean their teeth before the water froze. Henry was pacing the deck looking masterful, taking advantage of his privileged position as dorm leader to be wearing a long woollen muffler and a cap with his dressing-gown and pyjamas. That night’s victim, a boy called Arthur Nubble, had been satisfactorily reduced to a sobbing, blanket-covered lump in the corner.
Most of the boys in the dormitory thought of the war as a rare treat which they had missed and which would never be on offer again. One tall, red-faced boy with a premature five o’clock shadow, a great masturbator named Maybrick, told them stories of his father’s exploits in the Navy. ‘Six days in an open boat, my dad was,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘One of the ratings went raving mad!’ ‘My father did commando landings in North Africa.’ This was Pusey, a minute boy in the corner, lying hopelessly. ‘One of the young sailors in the open boat just couldn’t take it.’ May-brick ignored the interruption. ‘My father cradled him in his arms all night.’
‘I saw that film.’ Henry looked at Maybrick, who stared back at him red-faced and angry. The dormitory fell silent; only Fred sang quietly to his own wire-brush accompaniment:
Get you and keep you
In my arms evermore,
Leave all your lovers
Weeping on the faraway shore.
‘That film had Richard Attenborough in it.’ Henry was determined to shut Maybrick up. ‘I saw it at our local Odeon in Hartscombe.’
‘So that was your bloody war service, Simcox Major.’ Maybrick was clearly planning to start a slipper-throwing, anti-Henry landslide. ‘Watching flicks in your local Odeon.’
‘And what did you do for Britain, challenge the German High Command at pocket billiards?’ It was an easy laugh, not typical of Henry at his best, Fred thought, and Maybrick came back with a dangerous question, ‘What was your father in the war anyway?’ The answer ‘a parson’ was too awful for Fred to contemplate, and he waited for the attack on both of them, the flailing towels, hurled bodies and flung slippers, which it was bound to provoke. ‘Secret Service,’ Henry said with great authority.
Paradise Postponed Page 3